From IIRIRA to Trump: Connecting the Dots to the Current US Immigration Policy Crisis

Abstract

When signing into law the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA, or "the Act"), 1 President William J. Clinton asserted that the legislation strengthened "the rule of law by cracking down on illegal immigration at the border, in the workplace, and in the criminal justice system-without punishing those living in the United States legally" (Clinton 1996). In fact, the Act has severely punished US citizens and noncitizens of all statuses. It has also eroded the rule of law by eliminating due process from the overwhelming majority of removal cases, curtailing equitable relief from removal, mandating detention (without individualized custody determinations) for broad swaths of those facing deportation, and erecting insurmountable, technical roadblocks to asylum. In addition, it created new immigration-related crimes and established "the concept of 'criminal alienhood,'" which has "slowly, but purposefully" conflated criminality and lack of immigration status (Abrego et al. 2017, 695). It also conditioned family reunification on income, divided mixed-status families, and consigned other families to marginal and insecure lives in the United States (Lopez 2017, 246). Finally, it created the 287(g) program that enlists state and local law enforcement agencies in immigration enforcement and drives a wedge between police and immigrant communities. The trend of "cracking down" on immigrants did not begin with IIRIRA. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, and the 1990 Immigration Act, for example, expanded deportable offenses (Abrego et al. 2017, 697; Macías-Rojas 2018, 3-4). IIRIRA, however, significantly "ratchet[ed] up" the "punitive aspects of US immigration law already in place" (Abrego et al. 2017, 702), and erected much of the legal and operational infrastructure that underlies the Trump administration's plan to remove millions of undocumented residents and their families, to terrify others into leaving "voluntarily," and to slash legal immigration. In 2016, the Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) issued a call for papers to examine IIRIRA's multifaceted consequences. 2 Between March 2017 and January 2018, CMS published eight papers from this collection in its Journal on Migration and Human Security (JMHS). The papers cover the political conditions that gave rise to IIRIRA, and the Act's impact on immigrants, families, communities, and the US immigration system. This article draws on these papers-as well as sources closer to IIRIRA's

Communities in Crisis: Interior Removals and Their Human Consequences

“…IIRIRA expanded the grounds of removal and restricted relief from removal based on long residence in the United States and other equitable ties to the country. Its implementation, starting in 1997, triggered increased deportations of long-term residents, including LPRs, with US families, for committing relatively minor crimes often in the distant past (Kerwin 2018). 20 A CMS study found that 23 percent of mixed-status households -those with at least one US citizen and one undocumented resident -had mortgages (Warren and Kerwin 2017, 6).…”

Deported Men's and Father's Perspective: The Impacts of Family Separation on Children and Families in the U.S.

“…Our data were collected in early 2013 and since that time, the term "family separation, " has become closely associated with the Trump administration's policy of separating migrant children from their parents as they enter the U.S. (1)(2)(3). However, U.S. immigration policies resulted in the separation of families well before the Trump administration issued its zero tolerance order (4).…”

“…During the Clinton administration, the issue of immigration reform became framed within the politics of the War on Crime (4,6,7). The White House and Congress supported tougher penalties for unauthorized immigrants, leading to the passage of legislation such as the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) (6).…”

“…The White House and Congress supported tougher penalties for unauthorized immigrants, leading to the passage of legislation such as the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) (6). These laws weakened due process and judicial review protections for immigrants facing deportation, expanded the scope of criminal offenses that made immigrants eligible for deportation, mandated the detention of immigrants convicted of certain crimes, expanded cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration officers, and created legal frameworks for fast-track deportations (4,6,7,12). In the 15 years after the passage of the AEDPA and IIRIRA >4 million people were deported from the U.S., "more than twice the sum total of every deportation before 1997 (1.9 million people)" (11).…”

“…Weakened legal protections and increased funding for immigration enforcement operations led to unprecedented numbers of deportations in the 2000s and 2010s (4,23). It is difficult to list a single figure for the total number deportations that occur annually as DHS does not use the term deportation, but instead classifies enforcement actions as either removals or returns (24)(25)(26).…”